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Competitive Innovations in 10th: Mayhem in Mechelen pt.3 – WTC Teams

By James "One_Wing" Grover

Teams! We love a bit of Teams!

The WTC is both one of the largest Team events of the year and kicks off the season where a bunch of smaller (but still very large) Team events fire the world over. It would also be a dereliction of our duty to not pay attention to one of the largest concentrations of top 40K players we get each year, so today I (Wings) will be looking at the composition of the top four teams from the WTC, looking at what makes them tick as a roster, and seeing if there’s anything that might break through into the singles world.

As always, if you’re not familiar with how Team events work, it’s worth taking a quick look at Start Competing: Warhammer 40,000 Team Tournaments to get a quick rundown. I’m going to be using terminology like “defender lists” pretty liberally, so if you start reading and have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, go read that and then come back to this article.

Finally, if you’ve arrived here looking for the rundown of this week’s singles events, check out parts one and two of the column instead.

1st Place – France

Team Composition

Alexandre “Salysia” Sacco – Thousand Sons

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Arnaud “Ashord” Allot – Necrons (Hypercrypt Legion)

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Clément “Lebull” Cordeau – Death Guard

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Hugo “Quenthel” Richiardi – Ynnari

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Matt “Tanker” Bonnet – Chaos Space Marines (Renegade Raiders)

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Nicolas “Ptit-Nico” Seguier – Astra Militarum

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Olivier “Père Kstor” Weiss – Black Templars (Righteous Crusaders)

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Yohann “AltF4” Teston – Grey Knights

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Thoughts

If you looked at the results of the Warmaster GT, then seeing France on top here isn’t going to be massively surprising, as a lot of these lists performed extremely strongly in the singles event, sweeping the entire podium and putting in several more X-1 finishes on top of that. That speaks to the fact that these lists are just good as well as being well tuned for teams, and they’re in the hands of some of the world’s best players.

The standout centrepiece here is Olivier’s Black Templars build, which was just as brutal in the main WTC as it was in the Warmaster. This is a perfect list for hunting 20-0 scores – it’s incredibly overwhelming for many foes to try and deal with, it’s durable and INFANTRY-based, so can play on most terrain maps, and scores aggressively enough that if the enemy somehow does get a good pairing into it, it’ll still come away with some points. It did this job extremely well, picking up lots of high scores. The other build from this team that stood out from a big points angle is the Chaos Space Marine army – three Accursed Commune bricks isn’t as hard to clear as the Templar horde, but it’s still a scary amount of aggression and comes with a very strong second wave, helping lock in any advantage it can build up.

Between those two, the Grey Knights, Death Guard and the Astra Militarum, the team also build up a critical mass of very tough builds, which is ideal for potentially forcing some bad matchups on foes who can’t handle the heavy stuff. This sort of team-level skew can always be a great way to tip the scales in your favour, but what stands out about these additional three durability builds is that they’re also pretty strong at defensively scoring thanks to good volumes of Infantry and useful mobility tools. Grey Knights seem to have been very popular on the top tables, and while you can build them for gut-punch power (as we’ll see in a bit), the more common usage seemed to be as a flexible all-rounder that can force draws. Grey Knights are the best faction in the game at forcing the War of Attrition secret mission, and tend to be great at tactical Secondaries too, which makes them a great defensive build.

Also great on the defence is the Ynnari list, a classic go-wide scoring monstrosity. There will certainly be things that can overpower it, but the plan of just dodging the foe and racking up points can be quite hard to deal with. It also shows a noticeable trend in “defender” builds at this event, which is that a lot of them cut down to a single Character, helping make Assassinate a rough draw even when played Tactical. My assumption is that Secret Missions existing make it more important than ever to cut off your opponent’s Secondary scoring, because there are far more opportunities to “rubberband” on Primary than we’ve been used to in previous Mission Packs.

Finally, we’ve got two all-rounder builds in the Hypercrypt and Thousand Sons. The Hypercrypt list thoroughly proved itself as able to crush all-comers in the Warmaster, and Arnaud’s build combines the usual ultra-reliable scoring of Hypercrypt with flexibility to play on different terrain maps via the melee stuff. You’d want to avoid running it up against a board flood horde like the Templars build, and maybe not into Chaos Knights, but anything else? Good times. Thousand Sons round off the roster, and really the takeaway here is that the WTC results cement them as the best all-rounder faction in the game – they’re the only army that turns up in all of the top four rosters, and the builds don’t look particularly different from what you see in singles (though they do more consistently choose at least one Mutalith). You simply cannot go wrong with Tzeentch’s finest.

A nasty roster overall, and also one that’s clearly had a lot of planning put in – half the factions the French used were unique in the top four, impressive even in an event that had a very healthy amount of faction diversity at the top. Well done to team France for taking the championship!

2nd Place – Spain

Team Composition

Alejandro Mancuso Serrano – Grey Knights

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Gonzalo “Raven” De La Moneda – Chaos Daemons

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Guillermo Palacios – Dark Angels (Gladius Task Force)

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Jorge “Giorgio” Feijoo – Adepta Sororitas (Bringers of Flame)

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Luis “Terroxer el Rojo” Balmori – Thousand Sons

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Manuel Gil – Drukhari (Skysplinter Assault)

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Marco Esteban – Tyranids (Vanguard Onslaught)

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Roger Boira – T’au Empire (Mont’ka)

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Thoughts

In second place we’ve got a phenomenal showing from team Spain, leaning a bit more towards all-rounder builds compared to the durable French roster, but tweaking them for the format and adding some nice overwhelming pressure tricks. The easy one to tick off here is Thousand Sons – as above, they are the best all-rounder army in the game, and I’ve written so many words about them in this column in the past 12 months that I do not have any more to say.

Joining them in the “strong all-rounder” slots here are the Dark Angels and Bringers of Flame builds, both staples of the current singles scene. Both of these are adapted for Teams by cutting out all non-essential Characters, leaving both very tricky to pick up Assassinate against, helping them eke out victories if they end up in an all-rounder-off. The Sisters also skew a little bit crunchier than normal, as without normal buff Characters the use of more hulls and some Penitent Engines become more appealing. The Drukhari also feel like they’re build in a fairly all-rounder fashion, the Talos and Grotesques ensuring they’ve got a bit more of a backbone compared to the standard Skysplinter setup.

Nest up for this loadout we’ve got three powerful gut-punch builds in the Tyranids, Daemons and Grey Knights.  The Daemons were the most successful of these at getting 20-0s, and the plan of firing Bloodletters through walls to keep the opponent under the gun seems to have been popular across the field. The Tyranids ended up playing as more of a defender list – the initial rush here is so strong that picking up a big win against them is going to be rough, but a metagame built for the threat of Blood Angels is definitely going to be able to handle 30 Genestealers some of the time. Finally, the deployment of ultracrunch Canis Rex-toting Grey Knights definitely brought home the big scores in some rounds, but was pretty binary – they took some 20-0 losses as well, suggesting that going for the big hitters somewhat undermines the Grey Knights strong defender capabilities.

Finally, go-wide T’au makes its only appearance in the top four, and it looks like the rest of the field were sleepign on them. Tau as a faction get so much stuff on the table that they’re hard to take down quickly, and the fact that you can build a go-wide list like this that can drop to a single Character without losing too much helps lean into a defender strategy. In the event, Roger went beyond just being a defender and became one of the team’s most consistent performers, picking up five wins and two draws, a really strong showing for a faction that has historically often ended up quite binary.

Great to see such a strong showing from Spain, and encouraging that their roster is quite different from France’s but still super strong. Congratulations!

3rd Place – Poland

Team Composition

Jakub “Skark” Wichrowski – Chaos Space Marines (Renegade Raiders)

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Jakub “Vladdi” Podruczny – Grey Knights

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Maciej ‘Pumba’ Guziec – Thousand Sons

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Michał Duda – Adeptus Mechanicus (Skitarii Hunter Cohort)

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Patryk “Majson” Maik – Adepta Sororitas (Bringers of Flame)

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Paweł “Kruker” Kruk – Space Wolves (Stormlance Task Force)

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Tomasz “Gyto” Garkowski – Necrons (Awakened Dynasty)

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Łukasz ‘Lesiu’ Leszkiewicz – Adeptus Custodes (Shield Host)

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Thoughts

In third, Poland have brought a mixture of gut punches and all-rounders, and something to highlight at a team level is that their scoring “floor” was very high – their players were doing a great job of coming away from even losing games with some points, and at the WTC every point counts.

Gut-punch wise we’ve got three builds to look at here – the Chaos Space Marines, the Grey Knights and the Space Wolves. The CSM skew heavily towards their efficient shooty hulls, taking advantage of only really needing Abaddon as a Character to make those tick, while in Grey Knight land we’ve got the six Dreadknight spectacular, always a nightmare to handle. For the Wolves, meanwhile, it’s Wolf Jail, and I’m honestly surprised that this build only shows up once in the top four. Obviously you’re competing against Dark Angels, Templars and Blood Angels to use your Marine slot on this, but the whole point of the army is that it shuts some foes out of the game completely, perfect for 20-0 scoring. These three heavy hitters did duly pick up a healthy number of big wins, which combined with the high score floor of the test of the team to put Poland in third place.

Among the other five lists, we’ve got the mandatory Tsons, a much more “normal” Bringers of Flame build, AdMech and Custodes builds that wouldn’t look out of place on a singles podium, and Awakened Necrons. The Necrons are perhaps the most unusual of the lists here, looking to be aiming for a defender plan by packing enough Lokhusts to neutralise whatever key threats the opponent has, then riding the long durability tail that Awakened has in its Characters to keep scoring all the way through. I’m not totally convinced by that as a plan, having used Awakened quite a bit myself – I think it has slightly too high a risk of just shattering under some kinds of pressure to go in as a defender build, but the flip side is that its efficiency at neutralising some targets can let it go on the offensive some of the time, and Tomasz picked up wins amidst the draws and narrow losses.

Overall, Poland seems to have played incredibly consistent 40K across the event, and that was enough to deliver them the third place trophy – congratulations!

4th Place – Sweden

Team Composition

Axel Rydén – Drukhari (Skysplinter Assault)

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Björn Eriksson – Imperial Knights

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Jesper Unander-Scharin – Dark Angels (Gladius Task Force)

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Joel Larsson – Chaos Daemons

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Jonathan Sleigh-Johnson – Adepta Sororitas (Bringers of Flame)

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Kalle Abrahamsson – Thousand Sons

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Olof Svensson – Leagues of Votann

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Sebastian Larsson – Chaos Knights

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Thoughts

Hot on Poland’s heels we’ve got a fantastic performance from Sweden, again going for a mix of all-rounders and gut punch builds. Their Thousand Sons build is unusually brutal, going for the full three Mutaliths, and they’re backed up by both flavours of Knights, giving this roster plenty of ways to overwhelm enemies with heavy hitters. Chaos Knights in particular are one of those lists that some armies borderline can’t deal with, making them an excellent spoiler in teams, and I think taking Imperial Knights as well makes a lot of sense, as it builds towards critical mass.

The Imperial Knights also provide the first sight of the other thing this roster does more of than the other three, which is to pack counters for some flavours of skew list. Knights with Canis and an Atrapos will obliterate enemy Vehicle/Monster builds, triple Hearthguard Votann (with Land Fortresses to protect two of the squads) will scythe through hordes, while a fairly “normal” Skysplinter list can pivot between an all-rounder plan and ruining the day of any elite melee infantry list. The Daemons also pull double duty – you can use Bloodletter missiles to try and overwhelm the foe, but having Be’lakor in the list gives you some strong counterplay against enemy shooting as well.

Finally, Dark Angels and Sisters all-rounders. Like Thousand Sons, both these builds are Just Good, and I honestly think it’s a bit of shame that the sheer efficiency of Deathwing Knights probably froze out experimentation with other Marine flavours for some teams. Definitely worked though!

Despite the giant stompy robots, I think this ends up feeling like the most cerebral of the four teams we’ve looked at, and I’m glad to see some smart tinkering rewarded.

Wrap Up

That’s it for this week, though we’re hoping to have a bit more Teams coverage in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled. In addition, we are now entering Teams season, so if you attend a team event and you want to draw our attention to it, do make sure to get in touch.

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